


A Girl and Her Cat

by Edonohana



Category: Pet Sematary - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cats, Gen, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-04 21:53:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21204671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/pseuds/Edonohana
Summary: Church doesn't get put down, and Ellie Creed grows up with an eternal undead cat companion.





	A Girl and Her Cat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hearthouses](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearthouses/gifts).

Ellie’s grandparents gave her everything she asked for. Ice cream for dinner? Sure. Watch TV all day? Why not. Send for her cat Church? Of course. 

She knew why they were doing it. All those gifts were to make up for their inability to give her back her parents and brother. She tested the limits of their generosity, found that there apparently were none, and got bored and stopped asking. She had the only thing she really wanted, anyway: she had Church.

Her grandparents didn’t like him. His breath was cold and smelled of dirt and rotten meat. When you picked him up, he felt loose beneath the skin, like an overripe fruit, and his fur was always a little sticky. 

He killed animals and decorated the house with them in ways that seemed almost deliberate. Did other cats dissect birds and place one organ on each step of the stairway, with the heart always at either the top or bottom step? Did other cats neatly stretch out the intestines of mice and then wind them in and out of the banisters? Did other cats always place the heads of their kills upright and staring on the floor or table or chair, and hide the feet under the bedcovers or inside coat pockets? Did other cats trace such intricate red patterns on the floor?

Ellie thought maybe Church had a sense of humor. She loved that about him, even though he stank too much for her to allow him to sleep with her. He never left anything in _her_ clothes. And while her grandparents complained that his stare was unsettling and joked uneasily that he was plotting their deaths, she thought his close watch over her was like that of a bodyguard. After all, they were the only survivors of their family.

She took him with her to college. The dorms didn’t allow cats, so she got an apartment that did. Her roommates never stayed long. Church left them little gifts and stared at them at night. But it was a tight housing market, as is common in college towns, and there were always more roommates. 

Church liked to sit on the sofa beside her while she studied, his muddy-colored eyes fixed on the anatomy drawings and autopsy photos. Sometimes he reached out a clumsy paw and patted at them. 

“Degloving injury,” Ellie would explain to him. “Chemical burn. Exsanguination.”

Her roommates never stayed long. 

But Church was always with her, through her undergraduate years, through the brutal grind of medical school, and through her residency as a pathologist. Sometimes he got into her room at night, and then she woke up choking and gasping from dreams of being buried alive or being paralyzed while an autopsy was performed on her. But with her history, nightmares weren’t unexpected.

Her grandparents died, but Church remained. Ellie sometimes thought that he must be getting old for a cat—wouldn’t he have to be at least twenty?—but cats could live into their thirties, sometimes. He probably had good genes. Or maybe he thrived on fresh blood.

The truth didn’t come to her in a blinding burst of revelation, but crept up on her with the silent cat’s tread that Church’s heavy body could never manage. After you do enough autopsies, you know what dead flesh feels like. If you’ve been present when life-support is disconnected, you know that breathing lungs and a beating heart can be nothing more than technicalities. 

It changed nothing. Ellie couldn’t imagine life without Church. They suited each other so well. His dark sense of humor, his skill with dissection, and his fascination with death all matched hers. And she never had to worry about losing him. 

Sometimes dead is better.


End file.
